torpfactory

I have a theory that at this point there exists a subset of decision makers who _want_ massive climate change to happen and are actively pushing for it. I assume they want to be ready to take advantage of the new world we’ll all be living in. To be king of the ashes, as it were.

Yeah - typically print the entire wafer then compare dies within a field (usually there are multiple dies exposed in a single exposure) to see which defects are in the same place on each field. This won’t work if there is only one die per field, as could be the case for an exceptionally large server chip. In that case you probably need to predict what the image will look like based on design files and then compare with the actual image and look for differences. You could also e-beam scan the whole wafer but this can take a while (like 30 days when I was around), night damage the wafer, and bumps up against the reliability of E-beam components. It wasn’t being seriously considered.

I think the masks can take it but their is a ton of difficulty in inspecting the masks themselves for defects. IIRC the leading candidate at the time I was in the industry was to actually expose wafers and then scan the wafers for defects which originated on the mask, hoping to not confuse these with other process defects. Not sure how they ended up solving that one.

Nah, rural politicians will most-likely find it more politically advantageous to claim that the hospitals are closing because of 'illegals', welfare-bound decadent city folks, or some hare-brained conspiracy theory.

It will be too difficult to square their political convictions with economic realities. Providing healthcare in rural areas will always be economically difficult. There aren't enough consumers in rural areas to support modern hospital facilities. Admitting this isn't a problem markets will solve, and that government taxes and spending might be the answer, is something that will prove very difficult indeed.

Maybe an interesting idea: with a very granular understanding of crash types, Tesla could add active software features to reduce their occurrence rate and pocket the savings.

There’s a strong argument to be made that overall health impacts will be lower if wildfires are reduced through prescribed burns rather than waiting for catastrophic ‘natural’ fires. I think this argument could be used. We can either plan ahead when to have some wildfire smoke and put resources in place to deal with it. Or we can try to react to large blazes.

The only thing roads have going for them as a location for solar is that we (humans) have a lot of road area to work with. Wouldn’t it be great if roads did double duty supporting our tires AND making some energy?

I’ve always wondered if there were some way to use the space above (as in you drive under them) the roads instead. Is there a mass-efficient-enough design to make putting panels above the road a profitable thing.

Trains don’t work in suburbs not because of space limitations - there just aren’t enough paying customers per mile of track to make the economics work.

Thank you for posting. It is very important to put into context how badly fossil fuel companies may have knowingly screwed us.

We’re going to need both approaches: ground up and top down. People will need to learn to do with less. Better to start a mass movement towards popularizing minimized consumption so that people are used to the idea and embrace it when the policy changes (such as a carbon tax) begin to incentivize specific choices.

We can either do this now, in an organized and equitable way, or later in a chaotic and unfair way.

Well we are definitely in agreement about the long term then. Cheers

I imagine that it would take a fair number of new workers to help burn that $4.5T. They wouldn't work for oil companies, but they might still be involved in energy production.

Besides, it's not like we have some choice here. We can either decarbonize our world economy or perish. I'm awful sick of the 'but the jobs' arguments. We don't need jobs in outdated, polluting industries. That is outright theft of healthy ecosystems from future generations for short term gain, if you can call it that.

To be clear, I never said technology was the only solution. We have to parallel-path this entire enterprise. We need a change of culture and values just as much as technology. I'm not counting on only technology, but I really do believe we'll need both approaches here. As engineers, our part in this may be to create technological solutions. I hope culture thought leaders do their part and espouse a different way of living that replaces material consumption and status symbols with real human community.

It won't get better by itself, hence the "call to arms". Engineers need to choose to work on, maybe even for less money or less job security, solutions which are so much better that policy and implementation will contort themselves toward the new paradigms. Politics is the really effective avenue to solve this but it is a lot easier if better alternative solutions exist.

I wanted to emphasize that the optimism can be a useful tool to gain motivation. Realistically I think we're in for a world of hurt, but being depressed doesn't motivate me like optimism does. It's a mind trick, not a realistic accounting of the current state of affairs.

The optimistic side of me reads this as a call to arms for engineers.

The political and economic calculations aren't stagnant. If there emerge better and cheaper alternatives, the market will usually make the switch happen. The key thing is the presence of better alternatives. We're already seeing this in action with electricity generation. Solar and wind are cheaper for bulk generation than fossil sources. A few incremental advances in battery technology are now required to unlock the full potential of renewables, but there seems to be a clear path forward. These developments are the result of thousands of engineers time and energy along with relatively modest subsidies and private investment to pay their salaries.

The same may be true for cement. The alternatives are not yet better or cheaper, but some investment might get them there. Or not, we don't really know for sure.

We may be too late to prevent total catastrophe, but I'd rather go down trying. It's up to us to create the alternatives which allow the political and economic solutions to be viable. Who's with me?

We have a whole ecosystem of ride sharing apps that IMO are even more ripe for nefarious activities. If your Uber or Lyft driver wanted to hurt you, they very well could. This is such a low likelihood risk that it's barely work talking about.

There is much debate in this thread about which approach is best for combating global warming. It is plainly obvious that large scale policy efforts will need to happen at some point. This is the “top down” approach delivered by collective political action.

But there also ought to be a bottoms up culture change which encourages humans to recognize and self-limit their own impact. The world is too populous that our own actions won’t impact others at the new scale humanity exists. We won’t have political action without some parts or hopefully all of the culture embracing limits on our behavior. I don’t think these two approaches are mutually exclusive.

To address the parent comment here: Calling strangers bad people is very seldom a fruitful rhetorical approach, and I would advise against it. But individual action will end up being required someday; might as well start practicing today.

I suggest everyone take a look at the most recent available NHTSA data to help create informed opinions on the topic of car safety with respect to fatal accident causes:

https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...

My personal takeaways:

1) The sum of speeding + alcohol is 55% of the total number of fatalities. Self driving cars won't get drunk (we hope) and speeding is something which could certainly be limited in software. Lots of reasons to believe self driving will make a significant impact here, whenever it finally arrives.

On the other hand, you don't really need self driving to prevent these. You could force all vehicles to have a breathalizer interlock before driving (assuming these devices could be made to be very accurate and not spoofable, I believe these are both technically feasible goals). Or just enforce the living daylights out of it - driving drunk, lose your license for the rest of your life. Not nice I suppose but neither are ten thousand deaths per year. Speeding is a similar story. Why not put a GPS device in every car (I think this may already be the case) and geo-fence speed limits? Technically very feasible. Some people will claim you need to speed sometimes but I believe these arguments to be total bullshit. Ambulances may need to speed sometimes. Or again just enforce the living daylights out of it. Speeding over 5MPH above the speed limit, license gone for the rest of your life. Not nice I suppose but neither are ten thousand deaths per year.

We probably won't do any of the non-self driving things I mentioned above because they are politically untenable in America. Death on the roads is such a normalized facet of modern life that most people don't really consider the alternative: limited loss of freedom with many fewer deaths and injuries.

2) The wearing of seat-belts seems to still be a big problem for some people. 44% of motor vehicle occupants who died were not wearing one. No self driving needed here. In fact, this problem is somewhat orthogonal to self-driving. You would still want to be restrained in a self driving car. It would be easy enough to create an occupant sensor and seat belt interlock to operate the car. The car already beeps at you if you're not wearing it. Why not take the beeping a step further.

3) Running into cyclists (both motorized and human-powered) is also a reasonably large problem. Self driving will almost certainly help here (uber's incident not withstanding) but there are non technological solutions to consider. What about increasing the liability for drivers who injure or kill cyclists? What about steep criminal penalties for hitting a cyclist?

4) There isn't even a category for "mechanical failure". Cars don't really crash due to problems with the car per-se. Or at least not a rates that matter compared to the others.

5) Rural driving seems pretty dangerous - 50% of fatalities but only 19% of the population lives there. I don't think they dig into the details here but I'd be interested to see the cause breakdown for rural users. Growing up in Wisconsin, driving home drunk from rural bars was basically ubiquitous. I always advise to stay off the roads around bar time if possible.

It is important to consider that our roads are unsafe mostly because of the system of policies we have set up governing them. We still aren't serious enough about drunk driving. The debate around safety and speeding is hardly even happening. Hitting and killing non-automobile road users is often just a traffic citation. The licensing system is a joke. In what other safety-critical certification system can you take one exam at age 16 and then renew your certification for the rest of your life without any kind of additional training or examination? There is a ton we _could_ be doing outside of self-driving technology to make the roads safer.

Personal preferences on the above discussion: FOR self driving cars, even ones that are only marginally safer than humans. FOR geo-fenced speed limits. FOR breathlizers in all vehicles. FOR steep penalties for drunk driving, speeding, and killing non-automobile road users. FOR much more stringent licensing requirements. Death on the roads ought not be a feature of modern life.

In my experience as a mechanical designer physical testing, especially system level integrated testing, is the only way to find errors in the “unknown unknown” category. In a complex system (mechanical, electrical, software, biological, basically all of them), there usually exist interactions that are very difficult to predict. Software-based simulation can help, but is only as good as the models which are used to describe the underlying physics. In my experience, these models aren’t nearly good enough, and without testing, you can’t even say what is wrong with them.

Full-up testing isn’t always possible, but it shouldn’t be abandoned only because it is costly or difficult.

It will almost certainly be necessary to significantly overprovision both panels and batteries in order to avoid running out of power or needing to add more later. Hopefully the cost decreases will reduce the financial headache of this... time will tell.

I think there is an unrealized business model out there where a company builds, installs, and then maintains (incl. emergency fixes) solar+battery installs for a monthly fee, just like what you pay to the electric utility today. Such a business would hopefully achieve some cost savings by buying parts in bulk and be able to quickly fix issues by using similar system designs. It would be a bit like the electric utility, but they wouldn't own any grid or power plants.

I feel like there should be a business model where the customer pays a monthly fee for service but the service is "install and maintain solar + battery". As long as it is a similar price to grid connection, basically just force all users who would be defecting onto the new business model. I think customers would protest a lot less in that circumstance.

As for medical devices and whatnot: the grid is already not 100% reliable. The replacement would need to be of comparable reliability, but I don't think the threshold is 100% reliable. If you've got medical devices critical to your continued existence, you need more redundancy than either the grid or solar+battery.

I don't see is a particularly fair model for stuff like this. Just a bunch of bad or worse options. Honestly I think once cost parity is achieved, a lot of these questions will evaporate.

I think this presents an interesting case for permanent "grid defection" in rural areas.

The theory goes that as solar panels and battery prices drop, it will eventually make sense for homeowners to produce their own power, and "defect" from the electrical grid completely. Obviously this isn't a perfect solution: for example, the homeowner is now solely responsible for fixing their own power supply issues, instead of the collective "insurance" the grid operator provides by fixing grid issues for customers.

I think that rural customers in wildfire prone areas provide one of the best use cases for grid defection. The power company can save money in two ways: by not having to maintain relatively long power lines which serve few customers and by reducing their exposure to liability for wildfire damages. It might even be in the utilities interest to subsidize rural customers defection, to focus on more urban customers. Grid defection relies on low-cost solar and batter technology, and I think we will have both in the next decade. This is something that was not even possible in years past: extending the grid to rural areas was a great example of government sponsored economic equity that market forces alone may not have provided.

Two things that would help aid the transition: (1) Holding grid operators liable for wildfire risk (or at least part of it) and (2) forcing rural customers to pay a greater price for their power, reflective of the greater cost to provide it. I know (2) won't be popular but I think it does align some economic incentives correctly. I would also advocate implementing price increases only when solar+battery is very close to grid parity, so customers actually have a reasonable choice.

That is simply not true. The US may not produce as much visible pollution anymore, but we still emit a ton of carbon. Canada, Australia, and Saudi Arabia are all about as much or more than us but China is significantly less per capita.

https://www.ucsusa.org/global-warming/science-and-impacts/sc...

Our ancestors didn't have microbiology. As long as we pay attention to the science, we won't be repeating history.

Carbon neutral is kind of the 'whole enchilada' and like many 100% efforts, the last few percent cost the most. I don't know the actual cost breakdown, but if we assume the pareto principle applies, we will probably get a great amount of benefit for doing 20% of that investment in the most polluting industries.

Saying it will cost $1T a year is just FUD from that perspective. Sure, doing it all will be very expensive, but if doing most of it is a hell of lot less expensive, why scare everyone by covering the 'worst case scenario'?

Just to back up your point a bit:

https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...

Running existing coal and nuclear generation appears to be cheap (2nd chart), but new generation appears to be much more expensive (1st chart). The cost of Solar + Storage is low and dropping, and already beats the cost of new nuclear plants (4th chart).

BTW, I grew up on the east side of Madison, Cheers.

I don’t think journalists are necessarily aware of (maybe they just don’t care) how long root cause investigations can take. Obviously the euphemistically described “anomaly” is going to set them back, but going public without a clear root cause would make them look incompetent.

How does the technology from Prometheus count as carbon recapture? We end up taking a (relative to the size of the problem) small amount of the 'extra' carbon out of the atmosphere... and then proceed to burn it and put it right back in. IMO carbon recapture only counts if the carbon gets removed permanently. But Prometheus's technology is problematic for other reasons.

Let's say that all of the $3/gallon which was quoted can be attributed to electricity cost and nothing else. At $0.12/kWh that would be turning 25kWh of electrical energy into ~36kWh of chemical energy (gasoline). Now it needs to be transported to the gas station, which costs something like 10% of the total energy content. So now we're back to ~32kWh of chemical energy delivered to the customer. They convert it into mechanical energy at 20% efficiency [1]. So you've converted 25kWh of electrical energy into 6.5kWh of mechanical energy at the customer's wheels. Meanwhile, we would be using a fuel that is interchangeable with carbon we dig out of the ground. What are the chances we limit ourselves to only the "green gasoline" and ignore the stuff in the ground?

Meanwhile electric vehicles convert ~60% [1] of the electrical energy used to charge them into mechanical energy. So you convert that 25kWh into 15kWh of mechanical energy. Energy can be generated in many ways, many of them not very green at all. Let's assume both the "green gasoline machine" and the EV charging box are powered by the same grid. You could go 2.3x as far with the EV for the same energy input.

Now if Prometheus is making "green jet fuel" I'd be interested because there isn't any obvious electrification solution to long distance air travel that seems close to commercialization.

[1] https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/evtech.shtml

Not that this would be and easy thing to do but I always read the demand curve as the best possible reason to have a lot of destination chargers (in addition to home chargers). People are out in the community with their cars during the day when solar production is highest. Start piping that production into those batteries when it isn't needed elsewhere.

I think the general tone about Tesla on HN is a bit strange. On the one hand, Musk is certainly guilty of creating "hype" around Tesla. He has a showman's aesthetic, and deploys it to great effect generating interest in his products. His timelines are always ambitious (or insane), and I never take them at face value. He boasts about capabilities that are presently out of reach and sound impossible.

On the other hand, what other company has yet brought such compelling EVs to market? Would Porsche have invested in the Taycan as soon/at all if not for Tesla? I think the years ahead will be filled with fantastic EVs, but Tesla should be given credit for showing what was possible. It's not like they've stop innovating, either. They just upped the range on the Model S to 370 miles.

A lot of the hand wringing on HN these days has to do with Tesla's self driving efforts and Musk's controversial statements about timeline and technology. I think it remains to be seen if he is correct that (1) Lidar is not required and (2) if his timeline is even remotely reasonable. On the other hand, which other car company is shipping a product as capable as the current 'navigate-on-autopilot' feature? Google is doing pretty limited testing in Arizona, Uber is doing so in Pittsburgh. GM has their cruise division. But none of these offerings are in customer hands. I really doubt there will be L4 self driving in a Tesla by the end of this year, but sometime next year? I don't think that is out of the question.